Re: What are the downsides to 8MB blocks?

Some idiots are still running nodes on Raspberry Pis or Beagle Bones.

Exactly what is so idiotic about supporting the Bitcoin network by running dedicated devices as nodes (like Raspberry Pis) ?

Yeah, why don't you buy 2 TB SSD to everybody in Bitcoin community Mr. Donator Legendary rich fella? Almost everybody in this community wants to run Bitcoin Core as node.
Or you want to limit node usage to some secret elite society? More centralization is definitely a good idea, huh?

Why would you need 2 TB SSD to store 512 MB of data? (we are talking about running a node here, right?) Even if you wanted to store the full blockchain 2 TB HDDs are cheap and would be enough for long time to the future.

The block chain size alone is 40 GB> right now. Where'd you get those 512 MB of data? o.o You need to have the full copy of the block chain since the genesis block to become a full node.

He's talking about blockchain pruning -- currently possible with Core client. Though it's not a full node really until UTXO commitments are in place. You still need full nodes to do initial sync and full validation, and someone must be running them.

I'm running XT, but yes. It downloads the full blockchain to validate it and prunes it to a set size. Sync will take as long as it normally would (as it needs to validate the whole blockchain), advantage is that only preset amount of storage space is used.